Raddling Tip for Multi-Colored Warps

When I wind my warps, I wind rather small bouts. Usually these bouts are about 2 inches to 3 inches wide. That is when I am working with 60/2 silk. Small bouts in such fine slippery yarn beam on much more smoothly and easily than wider bouts. With this crackle warp I am making bouts about 5 1/2 inches wide. It is mercerized cotton and 20/2 in size. It will be sett at 30 epi. This is in contrast to the silk which I sett normally around 60 epi.

When I make the bouts I always label them, 1,2,3 etc so that I know in what order they are supposed to go on. Where I would get stymied, however, is in trying to figure out which way each bout supposed to lie when I slip it onto the lease sticks.

One day , for no particular reason, I decided to leave the counting string at the cross in when I took it off the warping board. I usually took it off and reinserted it whole through the cross. I noticed when I was dropping the warp ends into the raddle, that sometimes the string at the counting cross where the lease sticks were, was sometimes tied off at the right, sometimes at the left. This didn't make much difference to me except that it was more awkward for me when the string was tied off at the left. But then I just cut it at the right and continued laying the warp ends in the raddle spaces.

When I started winding this current warp, I figured something out. I realized that when I took the warp off the board the tie at the cross would always be knotted on the same side. That meant I had to watch the placement of that knot when I put the lease sticks through the warp ends in preparation for raddling. Once the bouts themselves were in the proper order, all I had to do was make sure that the knots were all on the same side.


Here are two of the bouts on the lease sticks. The red yarn are the marking yarns I put on as I wound the bouts. On the right side are the loops that I made when I tied them on the warping board. On the warping board those ties were always made on the same side of the bout, the side facing me. Here I have arranged them on the lease sticks so that they face to the right. Since I work from right to left during this process, having them face right makes sense. The warp colors here, by the way, are quite accurate, at least on my computer screen.

Why is this so important for me? It is important because often my warps are multicolored and the ordering will often be random enough that I can't tell or remember by looking at an individual bout, just how the colors are supposed to go. If I don't get the warps put on correctly, the arrangement of the colors will not be what I had planned.

Problem solved.